


Boys don't cry

by SaunteringVaguelyDownwards



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Childhood, Gen, Genderqueer Character, Genderswap, fem!dean, girl!Dean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-16
Updated: 2013-04-16
Packaged: 2017-12-08 17:02:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/763833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SaunteringVaguelyDownwards/pseuds/SaunteringVaguelyDownwards
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Nadine is three years old, her mother reads her fairytales.</p>
<p>When Nadine is four years old, her home is eaten by flames.</p>
<p>When Nadine is eighteen years old, she tries everything she can not to be Nadine anymore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Boys don't cry

When Nadine is three years old, she has a small collection of colorful books about wicked stepmothers, dragons getting killed by knights, tiny men who make deals to steal children, princesses who sleep a lot and girls locked in towers. Her mother reads them to her, assuring her that there is more than man on earth, that people with wings looks out for her and that there are scary monsters too, and Nadine thinks that maybe her mom came out of one of those stories, maybe she is sleeping beauty, who was envied by the evil fairy for her charm and manner and her golden hair. Her mother has hair that glows in the sun and rosy lips that produce the nicest words, and Nadine looks just like her, except not quite so refined - with blonde wisps of hair, unruly and never combed, because she can't sit still long enough for her mom to defeat the tangles, but on photographs, sitting next to one another, mother and daughter share the same color of eyes, the same slope of shoulders, the same cut of jaw-line and the same bony wrists. Nadine is tiny and thin and her dad can lift her with one hand, but when he does he whisks her around like she could make his dreams fly, and she laughs with him, even though she always feels safer back on the ground.

 

-

 

When Nadine is four years old, she is woken up by her screaming father who shoves a wailing bundle of baby brother into her arms, and she outruns the smoke and fire that eat up her home faster than her feet can carry her, past crumbling walls and hellfire heat and flames that lick her pajamas, then she finally collapses on the street in front of the first fire-truck, coughing and with burnt soles, and an ash-covered, crying, but breathing – _breathing_ and unhurt and alive – kid in her shaking arms, and she doesn't let go of him even when paramedics swarm around her, when her dad finally sits down next to her in the hospital where her feet are propped up and she is carried carefully from bed to bed, and she doesn't see that his cheeks are wet and clean because there's Sammy, and Nadine knows from what the firemen say to her father that mom is not – not _here_ , so – so, she swallows hard and feeds him warm milk in a bottle one of the nurses found for her, and if her hands shake just a bit, that's the shock, the doctor says and gives her a blanket.

 

-

 

When Nadine is six years old, she can change diapers on a toddler that is almost too heavy to carry for her, she can stay up until nine o'clock to wait for her father, and after he yelled so much she went to cry in Sammys bed, she is learning to put salt lines onto every windowsill correctly, not broken and – and wrong - like last time - because otherwise monsters will come in and take Sammy and probably eat him - she is not so sure that's what monsters actually do, but she suspects they are a lot like the dragons she sometimes remembers, so they'll take her little brother away, and she didn't carry him out of a burning house just to let that happen because she's too _lazy_ to get some salt right, aren't you, Nadine? - she thinks that she is not very much like the sleeping princesses, that's more what Sammy does all the time, sleep and cry, while she thinks she'd make a great knight – and she'd like a horse to ride on into the sunset, or at least a pony, but when she tells dad about it one evening stacking bullets in neat rows and bathing Sammy because he can't keep his dinner in, he scoffs and tells her that's the dream of an air-headed _girl_ \- and while she eats her tomato soup straight out of the can, she squashes a banana into Sammys little bowl, which was given to her by one of the old lonely ladies who run motels deep in the countryside and always dreamed of having grandchildren. Nadine was told by one of those grandmas – she always calls them that, they give those two poor little kids food and baby clothes and it makes them so, so _happy_ Nadine can't help but feel a little grandchild-y herself - that potassium helps the brain grow and calcium strengthens the bones, so she makes sure to stuff chunky banana milk into Sammy’s mouth even if he doesn't seem impressed, but he's only two, so what does he know?

 

When Nadine holds a gun in her hands for the first time, feeling the somber weight and subtle, understated danger in her hands, she smiles and lets her father arrange her arms just so, alter her stance appropriately and then she shoots, and hits, and hits and hits bullseye on all the empty beer cans, and her dad is grinning so wide it makes her pound a fist in the air and jump into his arms and he whirls her like she could fly a little again. When she sits at the table afterwards, learning how to clean and polish and oil the parts that make up her new favorite toy, she is still smiling, and Sammy babbles animatedly beside her, and now she has all the means to keep him save, and she’s going to be _useful_.

 

In a town she was told is called Riverside and is very special because of a man who is yet to be born – which she is amazed with, because until now she only knew places that are special because of men who lived and died there, so she secretly hopes she'll be around when he comes to earth, and then she is told that she's confusing this with Jesus, who she knows even less about, only that he is already dead, so she rather waits for a the yet-to-be-born hero - she goes to elementary school for the first time, two weeks after it actually started, and finds herself among a lot of kids her own age for the first time in her life, and is surprised to learn they live most of their lives in the same place. They find her curious and talk to her about baseball and summer holidays, but when she starts telling them about monsters and dragons – they are still a little mingled in her head, and it makes for more impressive stories – she is banned to the back of the classroom by the teacher and not allowed to put up the picture she drew of her family – a dark man with a very detailed gun in a huge black car, a wafer-thin blonde kid with mismatched socks clutching a pink blob in a clown costume – she can't be picky with what the grandmas give her, and it looks _cute_ on Sammy – a bulky man consisting mostly of beard with a cap on top, his arms around a woman in a plaid shirt that's too big on her – Karen always borrows her husband’s clothes when it's just Nadine and Sammy around, says they are so much more comfy – and a murky shadow with yellow holes in his blurry head, which she added after some consideration, because her father talks about him so often she thinks he must be some distant brother of his, and she hopes he will like her picture when she brings it to the motel they are staying in. She finds it torn to shreds in the dustbin the next morning, and that's when she drops Sammy’s bowl of milk and soaked cornflakes, and hides in the shower until her dad manages to pick the lock and hugs her first the first time since they started living in a car.

Nadine watches the baseball team in the afternoon, with Sammy babbling by her side, and all the older girls come around to pet him and give him sweets and she sees the opportunity to sneak down to the field, nicks a training bat and smacks a ball against the school wall with all her might. Her grip on the bat is sure, because it's much lighter than her dads guns, and she is laughing by the third time the ball bounces clean off the wall, ready to be hit back again, and she has never had so much fun before with just herself. Then the trainer comes over, and stops, and she quickly drops the bat and tries to scurry past him, but of course he catches her and instead of giving her the yelling she is already covering her ears for, he gives her the bat and tells her to be at the field at three o'clock sharp tomorrow. Nadine wanders home in a daze of accomplishment and surprised pride and hopes her dad will like this better than the family picture. When they leave town the day before her first real match, she knows it's most probably because he forgot she's the star batter of first grade, and curls up on the backseat, her stolen bat stashed away under the drivers' seat.

 

-

 

When Nadine is eight years old, she has been in thirty-eight towns and sixteen states since she started counting, which must have been since she learned how to count, and it's one of her favorite pastimes – counting cars on the road, counting rooms in motels, counting beans into Sammy’s bowl, counting bullets in the Impalas trunk, counting beer bottles at Bobby’s, counting scars on her father’s hands and counting beats in _A Touch of Evil_. She plays connect-the-dots with Sammy on paper mats from diners, and keeps a postcard Bobby bought her with all the fifty states on it, checking them when she spots car plates from there and crossing them off when they drive over the state lines into them. They all look very much the same to her, except for the landscape, but she has learned that it's not a good idea to tell Sammy made-up stories about the monsters that live in the woods or the desert or the hills when just a few hours later dad comes back to them, dragging monster remains behind him – Sammy has problems talking and the fear and shock doesn't help it any, and he always mispronounces her name, mangling it to fit his mouth, and she is only half a sister to him – she thinks sometimes – because he can't form _n_ to follow _a – s_ he has been in eight schools and never stayed longer than four weeks, and as they roll into the next town, she makes sure to pick out the school with the largest sport grounds. When she applies for the baseball team, she is accepted with open arms because her hits send the balls flying higher than anybody else’s, but the boys on the team keep pulling at her hair which is as tangled as ever and looks nothing like her mother’s golden waves – she remembers this faintly, clutching the blonde strands between baby-chubby fingers, and she regularly looks at the Polaroid hidden in the glove box, but the rotting chemicals make her mother look less like a princess and more like a mad fairy as time goes by, with poison-green eyes and drab yellow hair – and the girls tell her to stop wearing boxer shorts and are envious of her long, thin legs that carry her farther and faster than most the tall fourth-graders. When her father gathers her and Sammy – who always sleeps on the bleachers or gets cooed on by the soccer moms and will grow up to be a pampered little princess – in the middle of practice, she goes packing her bag with a lump in her throat and behind her back, the hitter boys breathe sighs of relief, because this means there won't be a new transfer girl to bat better than them and steal their show anymore – and she hates the chorus of _bye, bye, Nadine, see you whenever_ that trails after her. That night, all the monsters in her dream have the faces of her ex-schoolmates and she hefts the big rifle to shoot rock salt straight through their heads. In her dream, she is taller and stronger and more menacing than anyone, even her father, and behind her, Sammy cheers her on and runs around telling everyone that yes, that's his guardian, and isn't she awesome? When she wakes up, she is still short and frail and can only aim with the small automated gun. So she sneaks out of the motel room, in the running shoes two sizes too big – but she'll grow into them, she has to, because sneakers are only good when new and damned expensive, and she wanted them so much, because they have a tiny horse symbol on the side – and goes running across the dusty pavement of Next Town, Nowhere Middle America. She runs until first her lungs and then her legs give out, and when the monster of the day – vampire, she now knows, all of them so different and unique and none of them like dragons – manages to graze her father and leave another scar to be counted, she goes running again and again, until her legs are not only long but also muscled, and then she sees a poster of soccer players, and decides then and there that's what she wants to look like. She runs every day, before making Sammy pappy breakfast because his teeth are too soft – not enough nutrients, the nurse at kindergarden said, and how can that be when she fed him milk and oatmeal and baby juice every day? - and she feels betrayed when they explain that growing kids need a different kind of food, and doesn't their mom feed them right? - that's when she hugs Sammy harder than he likes and whispers that's she's sorry he has weak teeth and will always remain a little shrimp because she gave him the wrong kind of food.

 

In a mountain town in Oregon – number forty-two – she kills unaided for the first time. When the goblin crashes at her feet, splattering her running sneakers with its yellowish body fluids and stinking of unclean toilets, the only thought rattling around her brain is that you have to burn the remains so nothing can come back, and that she got it before it got her – or Sammy – and it isn't until she has her face full of smelly ash and her hands drenched in gasoline that she realizes her father isn't even close to the cabin where they were attacked by the ugly creeper, has been absent for over a week – and then - and then she loses it, in the middle of a wood that grew on volcano lava, over fifteen miles from the next house, with a huge supply of bullets and a small bag full of canned beans and brown water from the kitchen sink, and she's still dreaming of being able to play a full baseball season with the same team, and she realizes it will never happen, just like she'll never get a pony – but that was a stupid girls' dream, and baseball is a proper boys' dream, isn't it, and _still_ she' not going to get it – and the goblin burns away on a pile of hastily gathered tinder, taking with him her shoes – she didn't grow into them, didn't have the time, and she already knows the next ones won't be new and _hers_ – and she watches the tiny horse and the white laces she got after winning a match get eaten up by the flames, and sees a house and a princess instead.

When she stalks back to the cabin, her throat raw and her feet bleeding and her eyes crying away the ash, Sammy shrieks as she comes back inside, and then she looks in the cracked mirror over the sink – still needs a chair for that – and sees that her hair is a gory mess of yellow goblin blood on her head, and there's her dad’s beard trimmer – and when he finally comes back three days later, with a dusty book and no food except a rabbit he shot on the way, he comments on her good work with the goblin, asks her if she made sure to burn all the bones -otherwise it's _sloppy_ and dangerous - and drives them twenty-seven hours straight – she counts, and crosses off Washington State – to Sioux Falls because he needs help deciphering the book he found, and there Bobby stares at her when she follows Sammy into the house, and good god girl, what have you done with your _hair_? - and then shakes his head and Karen helps her cut it all to the same length.

 

-

 

When Nadine is ten, she can read four languages, two of which are dead, and spends long car rides teaching Sammy the weird wiggles that make up old Greek and demon traps and tells him about djinns and ghosts so he isn't afraid when he is told to shoot at people that start to flicker when you squint. She can assemble twelve different types of guns in under a minute and run half a marathon, she can make almost anything out of eggs, ham and ketchup and make it edible too, she can't sing any Christmas songs and she drank her first beer a week ago.

In her fifty-fifth town and fourteenth school, she is dragging Sammy along disguised as a middle schooler, because the elementary is in the next town over and her dad doesn't have time to drive him there. The school is so small it has no proper baseball court and the kids play soccer in the yard before the bell, and she needs five minutes flat to score two goals, and there's cheering from all sides, so she has a good feeling about this place for once, until the most horrible sound on earth reaches her ears – Sammy cries, wails his mutilated version of her name in between choked sobs, and she shoots across the pavement, fury trailing like a fiery blaze behind her, and smashes into the boy about to punch her little brother, with all her weight and her monster-killing might and she's got great fists, hardened from trying to land one on her father when he tells her she's too thin still, and only stops when a teacher drags her away forcibly, and stunned silence follows her across the yard, only broken by the boy’s whimpers and Sammy’s sniffles. The soccer ball rolls in front of her feet as she is lead to the building, and she gives it a swift, angry kick – because – because it _betrayed_ her, lulled her into believing she'd like it here, and it bounces off the wall and slowly trundles into the unguarded goal – which belongs to the team she played for, but it is no matter – and then the entire school yard explodes into excited whispers and tentative cheers and she turns around, surprised, and sees Sammy, standing in front of the goal and grinning even though his nose is bleeding and so _proud_ and behind him, there are awed faces and toothy smiles and Sammy’s childish mutation of what used to be her name rising in a chorus because, as she finds out later, she beat up the biggest bully in school without batting an eye, and when she is given a lecture in the principal’s office, she is sitting on clouds and wanders out into class in a daze of power and pride. Suddenly she is not the new girl, or one of those military kids, she is _'Dine_ and she is awesome and everybody wants her to join their group at lunch. Sammy floats alongside her like he's basking in the sun, and that's the best thing about all of this, because as long as she can think back, she failed him and dad – now she has packets of orange juice to give him and can take him to movie nights at other kids' houses and he's invited to the book club and his eyes go so big they almost pop out of his head when he sees the library. 'Dine spends her days in a rush of running on speckled concrete and laughing over exploding chemicals and even writing a Spanish report and going fishing with the other soccer boys and scrawling postcards to Bobby. She gets deeply tanned and her hair bleaches to a proper blonde for the first time since she was a toddler, and one of her new friend’s moms works for the Salvation Army, and she gets a huge stack of used clothes and Sammy tears into it, holding up a Led Zeppelin t-shirt with bright eyes and she wears it every day, even though it almost reaches her knees.

And then a Mannegishi crashes into her on the way home to the motel, trying to drag her into the river and she kicks and yells and realizes that she doesn't have her knife in her boot and cold water floods her lungs and she tries to remember where you have to punch them until strong hands grab her and pull her away from the spirit, throwing her on the wet shore of the water and two shots ring, a resounding splash and then – silence. And then she's alone with her shivers and the adrenaline and the fear and her father’s raging disappointment, because really, is it too difficult to carry a silver knife wherever she goes, and imagine what if she'd been walking with Sammy and the monster attacked him because he's easy prey and she has no knife, and _where is Sam anyway_? She can't even save herself, how should she protect her brother then, useless airhead that she is? - she runs, shaking and panting and it still follows her into the study room where Sammy sits among his book loving co-nerds and she just grabs him, his bag, and hauls him out to the car that's waiting with a running motor and when they are past the Minnesota borders two hours later, she finally stops shivering enough to wriggle into a dry shirt and ball up the drenched Led Zeppelin tee and throw it to the Impalas' floor.

 

-

 

When Dine is twelve, she has a collection of eight knives – two silver, one gold-plated, one copper, two iron and two steel – she has failed most tests in her last three schools, but not in natural sciences, where's she's doing great, math, which is embarrassingly easy and mostly boring, and sports, naturally. She can't draw much beyond arcane symbols and various monsters but she can fake a good Spanish accent, she can still hit a baseball harder than most of the boys she plays with, but they are growing past her at a speedy rate and tend to run faster too. She finds hair sprouting all over her body and spots on her nose and that she can now heft all their weapons except the big rifle her father keeps for cases in need of brute firepower. She solves physics' puzzles on the car rides and plays Tetris and Mario on a Game Boy she stole at a mall in Omaha – it was just _there_ , and everybody was so distracted by the poltergeist her dad was dealing with she even had time to snatch the games and she keeps it stashed with her old baseball bat at the bottom of her duffel bag and if it feels like a guilty secret, it's still a great one, even Sammy had to agree – even though he rarely plays and rather buries his nose in books most of the time, and she can't understand how he doesn't get sick with the car winding up the Appalachians in North Carolina. When her dad orders a kids' portion for Sammy and a grown-up one for her at the next diner, she gleams with pride and eats it all, every last scarp, even though it is way too much and she ends up vomiting most of it into a toilet that smells like it hasn't been cleaned since that last person who shared her affliction, and that makes her throw up the rest of the meal. Sammy rubs her back and doesn't say a word to their father and brings her a glass of water to rinse her mouth with and she thinks that if she believed in God, she would thank him for Sammy every day.

When Nadine is bored from Sammy’s sixty-ninth recount of Huckleberry Finn and dad and Bobby are out hunting deer for a change and Karen is ironing a mountain of flannel shirts, she sneaks the old mangled shotgun Bobby’s been meaning to throw away for ages out of his safe, with a magazine full of slightly shabby bullets and strolls out into the junkyard, picks up a rusted barrel, and imagines it’s a demon on fire.

Then the shotgun smashes into her shoulder and she goes down in a tumble against the remains of a Peugeot and swears and picks herself up and – Bobby’s tool shed is over there, and a saw and some nails and a hour later, her eyes hurt from squinting and the saw is slightly crooked and the sandpaper left some nasty burns on her knuckles, but when she tries out her new old gun, it’s well balanced and her aim is as good as ever and when dad and Bobby come back, there is delightful surprise on their faces, and dad fires a round of shots into the Peugeot and ruffles her hair when he walks back to the house, and she gets a huge extra piece of cherry pie and when Sammy impatiently hurries her on because he wants to learn _too_ , her chest bursts with pride because she is really, really _useful_ and it fills her with all the love she sometimes thinks her mother took to the grave.

 

When she walks into her seventeenth school in her sixty-ninth town, she interrupts the teacher to introduce herself as Dine, doesn't mind that she has to wear ragged cut-off jeans because it's cool anyway and makes it to second batter on the school team in three weeks. Sammy and her stay at a friend’s house for a change, and Joshua is not much more gruff than Bobby or nosy than Karen or strict than dad, so they feel right at home. It's awesome to fall into the same bed every night for a month, and get up and find a fridge stuffed full with the neon-colored food Sammy always picks out and have a TV that allows her to zap through all new channels and even pick up more than one episode of Star Trek at a time, which enables her to join lunch discussions about Kirk vs. Picard – and finds a tape recorder in the basement, subsequently making a profitable business out of copying her dads' tapes and selling them to her schoolmates. They think she's amazing for being able to shoot all the tiny flags at the fun fair, and she gives the ugly blue moose she wins to Sammy, who goes bananas about it and carries it with him wherever he goes, even to his debate club, where it gets its own membership pin. At Halloween, a bunch of kids sneak out to the haunted house at the edge of the mountains, and Dine tags along because she's pretty sure she's the only one who knows what to do in case it's not just gossip, and at the end of the night, her iron bar and pound of salt see more action than the kids who fled the creaking building in a panic.

When Joshua and Dad are away on hunting trips for a few days she is furious to be left behind, but somebody needs to protect Sammy, and I can trust you not to mess up the salt lines again, right Nadine? - and she ducks away and that was just the one time, yes, the _one_ time you almost got Sammy _killed_ , and if you aren't up to the job, I can't rely on you to protect your brother, and that's the most important thing, so don't leave his side, understood, Nadine? - and when the Impala is just a speck on the mountain road she grabs a protesting Sammy and drags him to the haunted house and camps out there with Joshuas Bunsen burner as a stove and beans for breakfast, lunch and dinner and water from the cold river behind the house and there's nothing to do out here, but she's stubborn and refuses to go back to the warm house, so Sammy amuses himself with dads duffle and the Latin books in it and then – then he stands in front of her and screams and yells and cries and throws the journal dad forgot at her feet and – then she takes a deep breath and finds herself giving the most awkward explanations that, _yes_ , there are monsters and demons and supernatural meanies out there and _no_ , mom didn't die in a car crash and he doesn't speak to her for the rest of the night.

When Sammy breaks the icy silence in the morning in front of the empty fireplace with no stockings, he throws his too-long arms around her neck and she lets him with a huff, because it’s Christmas and because they’re both cold, and then he thrusts a crinkled envelope at her and _it was for dad_ , but he doesn’t deserve _anything_ and _merry early Christmas, Dine_ , and it’s a small amulet with horns and a thick leather cord and the gray morning light makes the shimmering bronze look a little dull, but it’s – she hugs Sammy back a little too hard and plants a terribly sloppy kiss on his head they both try to wipe off immediately and hands him the ratty copy of _The Golden Compass_ she actually bought for once, one dollar at the thrift store with one of the grandmas in it – and she ties the cord with six knots, and feels the metal warm to her skin every day after.

They trek back to Joshua’s house afterwards, but he comes back with Sammy later that day to burn the bones of the vengeful spirit she ganked all those weeks ago and lets him light the match, because he needs to grow up too sometime, even if she'd rather spoon-feed him cheerios for the rest of her life than have him face off the cruel world.

Then their father comes back and loads them into the car with few words and no time to say bye to schoolmates and then they're off to Bobby’s, and if Sammy almost crushes the moose or Dine doesn't shiver just because of the snow storm outside – at least they know the schools in Sioux Falls from three years ago.

 

When she sits in biology class, the walls are overflowing with charts and posters about how boys and girls grow into men and women, and she stands in front of the largest one, where a standard white American woman with bleach-blonde hair and ideal measurements is cut in half to reveal her interior to the world, and when Dine looks into the mirror at home in the evening, she finds only traces of what is supposed to be happening, and quickly covers those with the loose shirts and baggy pants that make up her wardrobe, because if dad didn't like her stupid girl dreams and shoes with ponies on them, he won't like – she has her own trimmer now, picked up at a yard sale in Texas and still in perfect condition, and she sets it to one inch, except for the nape, where she has Sammy help her cut it to a half. Ever since he sat through a math class with a hippie teacher that believes in world peace he bitches about how the metric system is _so_ much more logical, and insists it's actually 1.27 centimeters and that 1.3 would make a lot more sense now, and for the sake of peace and quiet, she lets him give her a metric haircut. She makes a mistake the next day and wears a tank top when she helps Karen prepare Christmas ham in the kitchen – even though she hates it and does it just to please Karen who always interrupts her when she plays baseball with Sammy or cleans guns with dad to make her pot flowers and sew napkins, and looks disappointed when Dine plants St. John’s Wort and stitches protection charms onto the cotton – and when she opens a soft present wrapped in red and pink ribbons on Christmas morning, she finds a white bra inside – she crushes it as fast as she can and her face burns and her heart hammers and she quickly tries to stuff it back into the wrapping – but Sammy saw it already, and laughs loudly and makes funny disgusted noises and tires to wrestle it from her, but she's still more than a head taller and runs upstairs and shoves it deep into her duffle and ignores Dad’s faintly amused-embarrassed chuckles and Bobby’s pragmatic gift – a warm winter coat she will be very thankful for when dad decides to stay in Washington, high up in the mountains, for five weeks – and Karen’s confused stare for the rest of the day. The bra is crunched up at the bottom of her bag under to the Metallica t-shirt her father bought her when they passed a gig in Chicago and she doesn't touch it, never, until one day after practice the coach comes up to her and tentatively ask her if she needs to borrow some sports underwear, and when she digs it out after a few deep breaths, it takes her a minute to figure out the clasps because she has never worn anything she couldn't just pull over her head, and when it's finally on, it's a little too loose for her and uncomfortable and she is about to rip it off when she sees a tiny black horse stitched onto the left strap and she stops and can't open the stupid clasps anyway and pulls on the biggest, baggiest hoodie she owns and stays in the bathroom until she's not trying to tear the bra into shreds.

 

-

 

When Dine is fourteen, she celebrates her birthday in the Arizona desert, alone since five days, without food since three, without water since one, and she keeps seeing dogs on the dunes – she knows there are no dogs in the desert, so they're the black dogs dad was looking for, but he's at least sixty miles away and she has no weapons except an iron knife, which won't even make them blink before they tear into her like the meager lunch she is – and she retreats deep into the ratty cabin that makes up her shelter and checks the few thin salt lines hidden in lead pipes so the wind doesn't carry them away. When she hears scratching and sniffles and deep, soft growls in the night, she isn't honestly sure whether it's the black dogs gearing up for a midnight snack or her hallucinations – she's been having them for hours and saw a woman in white or her mother or maybe Karen’s ghost – Dine never got around to saying thank you to her and regrets it even if she never wanted – and there it is again, closer this time maybe, and she presses herself into the one wall without holes and when she feels a wet breath on her ankle she grits her teeth harder and grabs her knife until the dry skin on her knuckles splits and she slowly raises it, because she can't go down without a fight, it's what dad would expect, it's what a soldier swears to and she brings the knife down with as much force as her cramped muscles allow and then some and spares a moment to think that at least Sammy isn't here – and then hell breaks loose. Terrifying, bone-shaking howls that would rip a wolf’s throat, echo off the far hills and make the sand and stones vibrate and gunshots ring through the cold desert air and light up the barley moonlit valleys and show the jagged edges of the terrible creatures and the few humans that run towards the cabin. She stabs blindly, desperately, in a flurry of panic and teeth that graze her and blood that may be the dog’s and may be her own and the adrenaline makes her dizzy and nauseous on her empty stomach and then a gunshot flashes and there are fangs an arm’s length from her face and gleaming yellow eyes and she can feel the damp, hot, disgusting breath enter her lungs and she jerks up her feeble knife and it enters right into the jugular and then there are two more shots and suddenly a mass of shaggy, terrifying monster collapses onto her and the blood streams out of its neck onto her jacket and it's warm and gooey and she shakes and vomits bile and breathes too fast and maybe she is screaming or somebody else is or it's Sammy and her stomach cramps as the black dog above her gurgles his last breath – she is tugged out from under it by strong, rough arms and half carried, half dragged to the car, her eyes streaming and her last thought as she collapses is that she mustn’t bleed or puke on the upholstery, because she spent all summer replacing it.

When she comes to, she's in a bed full of pillows and yellow drapes and it's not a motel – there are voices outside the door, and it sounds like her dad and a woman and a quarrel – when she tries to sit up, vertigo and sickness make her fall back into the many pillows, and suddenly there's movement at her side, and Sammy jumps up from the chair he must have slept in and showers her with questions and tears and worry and pushes a bottle with a straw in it at her and when the water finally passes her throat it burns in her parched mouth, and she drinks way too much and almost throws up again, but she's alive even if there is congealed dark monster blood all over her and her shoulder throbs from where the black dog crashed his jaw against her and hundreds of scratches make it painful to move her fingers, but she's alive. It doesn't get much better than that, and then Sammy puts away the water and very carefully tries to hug her and pushes a patchy, slightly deflated soccer ball into her crusty hands and between sobs and hiccups explains it’s her birthday present and she stares for a minute because she - she forgot, but _Sammy_ – and then she hugs Sammy so hard he yelps and has to give him a noogie even if it makes her knuckles tear up and bleed.

When her father comes in she is only half-awake, and there is a broad black woman behind him with the most heart-stopping glare Dine ever saw on a humans' face, but she leaves the room so quickly only her voice carries over, and she's furious with dad – for whatever reason, Dine can't find out because Sammy tries to feed her wheat goo and demands attention, otherwise he'll start to weep like the baby he still is, even though he is the most intelligent ten-year-old in the world and corrects spelling mistakes in her physics puzzles and reads books as thick as his head and memorized more Latin chants than dad – and when her father looks at her and says she lost weight, she bites her tongue hard, harder than usual, and balls her fists and doesn't have a breakdown because he left her as life bait with too little water and food and no guns because ever since she burned her hopes of baseball leagues and a home that is larger than a car in the Oregon mountains, she has crescent-moon shaped scars in the palms of her hands that remind her she lived through worse already and when she looks in the mirror her mom’s eyes stare back at her and that has to be enough. When she falls asleep on a stomach lightly filled with soup and water and a little bread, she dreams of a fireman that hands her Tetris blocks she is supposed to stack into a rifle but they don't fit, and then she is woken because she is carried outside, the hot Arizona sun she learned to hate making her curl up and huddle into the blanket she won't let go of, and in the car her head bumps against the window and the cracked desert roads rattles her bones and her aching shoulder and upset her squirming stomach and she wishes so badly for the hundred pillows on that bed, but she realizes they were just another kind of pony.

When she sits in a classroom the next time, she lost count of towns and schools – she was asleep or unconscious for so long and Sammy didn't pay attention because he thinks it's a useless exercise and won't play counting games anymore – and can't find the postcard with the states on it and knows how to hotwire a car in under two minutes and saw both Terminator and all three Alien movies and can make amazing burgers out of canned ingredients and run half a marathon, but she doesn't get accepted into the baseball team and is told to try the athletics club instead, where she discovers she's great with pole jumping and is elected to partake in the district competition in the co-ed finals. Sammy cheers from the bleachers and takes photographs with a disposable camera she nicked for him at a gas station in Salt Lake City, and when she looks at the group shot, she notices all the other girls on the team have rounded hips and breasts that shape their training suits and Dine looks like a wireframe next to them, tall and thin and muscled in obvious places, and she remembers the soccer player she saw on that poster, and goes to extra training sessions and the kids' bra Karen gave her still fits after two years.

 

And then.

 

Then she's playing soccer in an empty churchyard and forgot to shave her hair for more than a month and scores the winning goal and the team cheers and whistles and hugs her – until suddenly they let go of her like she is a piece of hot coal, and glare with confusion and – and step away a little and look at her secondhand football shirt that's soaked with sweat and her thin legs in her frayed jeans that are not loose enough to hide that there's no need for them to be loose at all and – and are you not a – and she has no words because there are sneers and she is dreadfully cold inside and numb and never bothered to correct them when they used the wrong pronouns and then – then she turns and runs and runs and runs and Sammy is scared because Dine never hides in their motel room or shakes with sobs, not even when there are monsters involved and all he can do is propose to go play with the new old ball to cheer her up, even though he's not fond of soccer, but she throws it against the wall with a yell and curls up in dads leather jacket, so he brings her warm milk – it's what she always did and does when he's upset, and he faintly remembers her telling him it's good for growth, so he figures if she grows some more, she'll be able to take down whatever nasty demon shook her so badly – and when she is finally asleep on one of the smelly beds with her wet cheeks crushed into the small pillow, he figures it's his turn tonight to do the salt lines. The next morning, their father gets ready to drive them to school on time for once, but Dine stays in bed and covers her ears and refuses to go.

 

When she comes back a day later, it's because her father got word of something deadly roaming the student halls and she grits her teeth once more and wraps bandages so tightly around her chest she can barely breathe and wears her baggiest sweater and endures the whispers that envelope her like fog wherever she goes and sits through English clutching her borrowed copy of _The Outsiders_. When her teacher asks her to stay behind after school because her test results were catastrophic, she is still avoiding searching gazes and not prepared for him to smash her into the whiteboard with a flick of his hand, but after that she expects his eyes to turn black and isn't distracted when they do, and hollers exorcisms at the top of her voice into his astonished face. And then he yells his last words and Dine’s eyes go wide, because this is so much better to bring home to dad than a stupid family picture and races all the way to the motel to tell about how she encountered one of the yellow eyed demon’s minions, and how his master must be close by because he begged him to come for help. When her father’s eyes go wild she preens with pride, and his clap on her back is better than a chocolate cake and balloons on a birthday morning.

 

-

 

When Dine is sixteen, she can shoot with two guns and hit all the marks, read thirteen anthologies of Batman and fancies herself a dark knight with a black car instead of a white horse now, learned to drive said car with the same pride Marlon Brando rode his motorbike, spent less than six weeks in school the last semester, can stitch up cuts and wounds with surgical thread better than most nurses she met, ran and won a local teen marathon the one time they’ve been to Florida – and her rediscovered postcard is now a mess of black and blue crosses, but she has little hope of nasty things showing up in happy Hawaii or frosty Alaska and hates planes anyway, if man were meant to fly he’d have wings is what she read somewhere, and she couldn’t agree more – she broke the high score meter on Tetris twice, and owns a black sports bra because she outgrew the white one a year ago and – can’t throw it away, because Karen – and when it needs to get washed, she always has enough quarters for the salon and Sammy should better train some more because his aim is still wonky when he’s running and dad has loads more important stuff to do than laundry and – she’s not exactly sad she doesn’t have to go to school often, because ever since – that – that accident – she doesn’t like to stay long in one place because – well, she feels guilty about telling Sammy not to come to baseball practice but he would – he’d probably be a little baffled because she’s not on the – she never takes showers after training anyway, and picks the XL-shirts and the nice thing about sports bras is that they’re really small and don’t push, on the contrary, and a little tape helps too and a clean pair of balled up socks is surprisingly convincing when arranged just so – but if Sammy came along, he’d talk about his _sister_ and that’s – also he’d probably yell at dad again, and that was a fight she’d rather not remember, a furious Sammy all worked up and at their father’s throat about demons and school and dinners consisting of fried everything and then suddenly _do you even see what you’re doing with Nadine?_ and there is quiet fury on dad’s face and maybe a little guilt but _she needs to get stronger to protect you_ and Sammy’s screech that ripped her ears – that _she shouldn’t have to_ and then more anger and terrible noise and Dine is ready to bolt out of the room when Sammy’s voice drops and is cold against her back and freezes her spine and says _neither of us is going to grow into the son you want_ and –

 

– then she’s outside and hits baseballs as hard as she can with her old bat in an empty field where _no one_ hears _anything_ and spends the entire night trying to breathe around the terrible elastic that squeezes the air out of her and in the morning there are ripped shreds of black lycra smoldering away among the cropped corn stalks.

 

When Dine hunts, she walks with a straight back and lets her long legs carry her to the demon like a horse to water, she knows almost as many chants as Sammy and the pitch of her voice doesn’t matter, because the demon gets expelled and wears horror on its face, and she has no reason not to hold her head high – but when Dine doesn’t hunt, she slouches a bit, hunches her shoulders forward a little, walks as if she spent the greater part of her life on a horse and does sit-ups and knee bends and push-ups which she counts meticulously – she needs to count something, since Sammy messed up her town tally, as he fondly named it – always great with nicknames, that’s Sammy, except when he wants to make a point and _hurt_ – and the Led Zeppelin t-shirt is still so wide she can probably fit inside twice, and yeah, she knows she’s a little thin where she’s not pure muscle, but it’s not just her breasts growing, it’s her hips and her butt and her thighs too, and she can’t help her lips growing plump and pink until they resemble her moms on that false-color Polaroid still hidden in the glove compartment – but she can help the rest, and what fat isn’t burned off playing soccer and baseball and dads rigorous training can be diminished if she doesn’t keep down the chicken wings and pizza that make up most of their meals – she found out she liked eating too much when she tried to just stop it – food helps stuff up the empty places inside her, the dark spots where she sometimes thinks that Sammy may not always need her help dealing with other kids, and dad could use a good whack on the head – and a few girls whispered diet tricks to each other on the schoolyard and one mimicked putting a finger down her throat and Dine proceeded from there, and it _worked_ and dad continued to use her as a great example of a healthy love for real food in front of Sammy who munched on his tomato and cucumber and threw scolding looks at her burger and she laughed and made disgusted faces at his salad and her old jeans are too short at the ankles but sit snug on her hips like they used to a year ago.

 

When Dine enters her next town, it has a gigantic aquarium she recognizes as the one from Star Trek: Save the Whales and is deeply disappointed to find no humpbacks there and at the next school, it’s 7th grade and her papers all claim she spent the previous six diligently studying math and history and such, and she figures it’s not completely fake – math remains as fun as ever, and even if Sammy is definitely the brains in their outfit, she manages catching up half a year’s worth of education in sciences fairly okay and makes all her compulsory presentations about numerology and unusual weather phenomena and witch hunts and ancient Greek, which impresses her English teacher enough to let her catastrophic spelling slide. On the paper she’s Nadine Winchester, but when she introduces herself as Dine and refuses to join gym class and uses the toilet on the first floor that’s wheelchair accessible and therefore without markers on the door, the teachers back away and let her be because they’re _sensitive_ and _respectful_ – Dine wishes they just didn’t care – and the sidelong glances and sneered insults she knows how to deal with, and her fists are much appreciated by the boxing team too, which has a few girls and a few boys and after she beat every single one of them on tryout day, they stop getting confused about pronouns and ask her to join instead.

When one of the guys starts bringing her an isotonic drink before every practice, she accepts it with a wide grin, and when one of the girls offers her a seat at the cafeteria every day, she plunks down on it with a grateful smile, and thinks it’s awesome to have friends to trade tapes with and Sammy can educate all his little co-nerds in all the ways Casper was _so_ unrealistic and plain _inaccurate_ , and have none of them movie people ever _met_ a real ghost, and then he kicks around her old scrappy soccer ball after gym, and the coaches see him run and aim with precision unworthy of such a shitty ball, and he's asked to come to practice, just for fun, and next thing Dine knows, he jumps around her neck, nearly knocking her out with the ridiculously corny trophy and she joins his excited cheers and buys him his first beer, laughing at his disgusted face and handing him a bag of neon-coloured sweets he practically inhales, glowing with all the pride she wishes her mom could still feel too. Dine loves every second of this boringly normal veneer of small-town American apple pie life, even if it’s just for a short time, because the last time she was able to walk with her head up among peers she was six years old and still dreaming of ponies. Now she’s ten years older and a week ago finally threw out the small kids' bra Karen gave her, but she cut off the strap with the stitching on it because it’s tiny and light and her only memento of the woman she now misses almost as much as her mom.

 

When Dine finds herself in a living room covered with chips and light beer in the fridge and cheerleaders in the pool and the Black Sabbath and Judas Priest she contributed blasting from the speakers, she can't help but grin at everyone because the spiked punch is making them all mellow and soft and giggly and she just drank the star pitcher under the table and is still walking upright writing mental thank you cards to Bobby, and she knows Sammy is safe at their motel with dad and she has no curfew because she did an excellent job with that poltergeist and got her very own pair of brand new sneakers for the first time in eight years, and this time they fit her feet even through there's no horse but the Ghostbusters on the side and Sammy has new ones too with Buzz Lightyear all over them. She weaves through the crowds of dancing and laughing and smoking people, shares a disgustingly lukewarm beer with her boxing mates and shoves one of them into the pool and flees into the house laughing so hard and exhilarated and _free_ she doesn't even pull the reflexive punch when somebody grabs her arms and she finds that you cannot just drive but also move along to Rob Halford’s screeches just great. She watches the kids around her shove and touch and give each other coy looks, and one of her boxing mates winks at her, hugging his girlfriend and nudging her until she takes a deep breath and thinks that yeah, she's just like one of them – for _once_ , for real – and finds grinning at pretty girls and handsome boys really easy when all they do is grin back, there are heads turned into her direction and maybe this kind of attention isn't quite so bad, and her grin melts into something a little more sure, because this is a lot like getting free cornflakes from one of the grandmas, except she's not small and a little cute anymore but tall for her age and maybe a bit too scarred, but nothing a long hoodie won't cover up. It takes another beer and two hours, but watching her boxing mates' clumsy attempts at impressing the cheerleaders from the other high school with fake fights is a good enough lesson, and she joins the tumble, and _thank John Winchester_ , because even three sheets into the wind Dine can kick like a mule and has fists of steel, and maybe it's a good thing she's more than a little tipsy, otherwise they'd all end up with broken noses, but all that her teammates suffer is some severely bruised pride and giggling cheerleaders they try to coax into tending to their wounds, and Dine ends up with her arm around a girl that may or may not be able to do seven flicflacs in a row, a head shorter than her and the most welcoming smile on lips that were probably painted red some hours ago, and Dines hands shake a bit and her breath isn't quite even and her throat is dry because what is she supposed to do when – but then she notices the girl’s fingers tremble too, and suddenly the world is righted again – Dine straightens her shoulders and stretches her spine to her full height and her own heart pounds harder than when she's face to face with a poltergeist and – but she handled the poltergeist like a champ, she's gonna handle this too and be the one who knows what to do and takes a deep breath and tightens her clammy hands on the soft hips that are so different and _alien_ from her own and the girl looks up at her, long curly hair damp and a little ruffled and eyes expectant and scared and a little uncertain, but they both move a little closer and the sound of drums is numbing and there's another nervous, fleeting, honest smile on the girls lips so – so Dine takes it for herself and –

 

When she sits in the cafeteria the next day, there are empty seats around her on their usual table, and an entirely new kind of whispers around her and shoves in the hallway and – she clenches her jaw and constructs an EMF meter in her head and imagines the big rifle in her hands and all the ugly monsters she fights every night to keep people like those around her safe and wonders if it's worth it.

Then her dad picks her up before her last class, with an unhappy Sammy piled in the back of the car and she feels a heavy weight lifted from her back and they are off into the goddamned desert again, but at least this time they're after the vampire together and when it lunges at dad’s throat, she manages to pick up the crossbow he dropped and her aim is as precise as ever and her hands don't tremble not a hair and then the creepy son of a bitch crumbles at her dad’s feet and maybe he looks a bit like one of her boxing mates, one who winks her way and encourages her to – but if that's so, it just makes her throw him onto the pile of dry bush a little harder and spill a little more petroleum than necessary and light three matches instead of one and then the stink of dead, burning monster clogs up her nose and she drags an ashy hand through her neatly cropped hair and stares into the fire and sees not just a vampire but a goblin and a pony and a far bigger fire too and – the damn ash really burns her eyes, that's all, and she is growing used to fire and doesn't sink her nails into the scarred half-moons in her palms with a lot of self-control and when she reaches the car she huddles into the backseat instead of shotgun and embraces an astonished Sammy a little more earnest than is usual for them and ignores her father’s furious rant about how she did not notice she was sparring with a freakin' _bloodsucker_ for weeks and feels Sammy breathe next to her, unharmed and already speeding through his newest magazine on how portable computers change the world and thinks that maybe there are people meant for playing baseball in the little league and people meant for hunting things that go bump in the night.

 

When she sits on the hood of the Impala, Sammy and dad inside the next motel with terrible dried flowers and paisley on every available vertical surface, a bag of fries and the third beer of the evening next to her – she's gonna puke into the bushes on the other side of the road, there are no lights over there, Dine checked and it's just like always looking for exits in rooms filled with monsters, always looking for places to vomit without being seen, cause the one time Sammy caught her, he smashed a vase into the wall, and she had to scrape together all her dimes and quarters to pay for it – she's staring at the stars and thinking of her mom reading to her about sleeping princesses and the winged people that are supposed to protect her, and she thinks the princesses can go take a page out of her book and try save themselves for once and the winged bastards can kiss her ass, because they sure are doing a shitty job protecting her.

 

When Dine is eighteen, she saw the Rolling Stones play live in Chicago, killed the only possessed bear in the recorded history of the USA, almost burned an entire corn field while lighting fireworks with Sammy – and the look on his face was totally worth every boring part-time-job to get the money and dad’s rage when they came back, smelling of smoke and drunk on cheap tequila and smeared with ketchup from the burgers à la Winchester – meat roasted over the open fire, buns half-black and more mayonnaise than a lettuce leaf could physically support, but that's the magic in it – grew another inch, but Sammy grew three and now wants to be called Sam – which she laughs off when he's annoyed and taunts him with a multitude of nicknames when he gives her the bitchface and the dark places inside her whisper that it's unfair because the one he gave her _stuck_ – she's an expert with a staggering array of conventional and slightly less so weaponry, she can make bullets out of almost anything – always in even numbers, because it's faster to count them that way, stash them in boxes in the back of the Impala, which she knows inside out and upside down and took apart and put together and it settles around her like a huge metallic security blanket, calming her after the adrenaline rush of killing a supernatural son of a bitch and when she opens the glove compartment to take out the almost entirely faded, sickly yellow photograph of her mother, she imagines the Impala hum around her, an extension of herself, large and strong and solid and all the things she's supposed to be – she is about to get kicked out of high school because the trail of paper following her academic non-progress across the states got a little too murky and ever since the death of a promising young boxer in one of her countless – she bites her lips, because she used to know that – ex-schools, the authorities have an eye on her and her father isn't keen on anyone looking too closely at his kids and their upbringing, so she accompanies him to hunts while Sammy – Sam gets to go to school and comes home to the motel to tell her all about how clouds and thunderstorms work and that he can to more subtractions and statistical likelihoods in his head than anybody else, and she listens with a bored face and thinks about how she played around with equations the last time she had to write a test – and that's pretty far away by now, and something inside her whispers that, yeah, that was actually _fun –_ andshe squashes it, because there's stuff far more important than that, like the fact she hasn't fulfilled her daily number of sit-ups – and thinks about how the EMF meter she build actually works better than the one her dad made, even though she wired it together from a discman she snagged from Bobby’s scrap-yard, but Sam is the brains, so she does everything she can to become the brawn, but Sam is growing not only up but strong too, and he can lift much more than she could when she was his age and – and then she panics and breathes too fast and goes out to run, run until her legs shake and her lungs revolt and her feet burn – she always ends up with burnt feet no matter what – but what use is it when she can't carry Sam anymore, can't save him from fires and monsters and their fathers burning anger – because their eyes spark with the same unforgiving, driven thirst – for revenge, for control, for independence – but when they turn to her, expecting her to match them angry inch for angry inch, a furious man just like themselves, all there stands is a tall, thin girl in ratty, torn jeans held to her with a huge belt, cause they'd fall off her skinny hips otherwise and baggy sweaters and bandages strapped to her chest underneath and looking like the wife of the one and the mother of the other, trying to act like a son and a brother instead and failing both – and then she runs some more.

 

 


End file.
